Did Sports Video Games Really Get Any Better in 2012?

Kotaku: Earlier this week, Metacritic bemoaned 2012 as a year of poorer review scores for video games than the one preceding it. Fewer titles surpassed the all-important 90—which practically guarantees job security to those who developed or greenlit the project—than in 2011. Interestingly, the three console platforms' average review scores all improved slightly.

This isn't proof of overall game quality any more than MVP voting is proof of overall player quality. If anything, it's proof of how observers reacted to the product put on the field. But it made me curious enough to go digging into how sports video games were scored. And even then, the numbers were, on the surface, surprising.
(PS3, SSX, UFC Undisputed 3, Wii, Xbox 360)

Madden still contains things that irritate me. Forcing you watch between play animations you don't want to watch which makes the games ten times longer than it needs to be. Games like Madden still can't be bothered to add a save game mechanism so you can save a game in progress etc etc.

The whole idea of in-between play animations, or REPLAYS, is to give the player a tv like experience. But if you want the games to go so quickly, why would you save during a game? Just play your two minute quarters on easy.

I know what the reason is, doesn't mean I want to watch them. I should at least have the option to turn them off. I want to play 15 minute quarters but I don't always want to do it in one session. Two minute quarters don't give you realistic outcomes, one drive can take up a whole quarter.

IMHO, Madden is still Madden...for every step forward there are always steps back. FIFA 13 improved mostly because of the new controls. NBA 2K has finally fixed the majority of it's nagging little details (aside from the damn rebounding). PES made a solid run at FIFA for the best soccer (football for anybody aside from us Americans) title. So, yes there were games that got better. Did they have some meteoric rise to the top of Metacritic? No, but how often will that ever happen with a sports title? Maybe every 3 or 4 years if we're lucky.